Hearty thanks! also....

LA VANGUARDIA, 21 April 2001

BARCELONA " Palau de la Musica ", 19/IV/2001.

BREGOVIC IN ALL HIS SPLENDOR

Little by little, with no unnecessary haste, with that blessed calm that illuminates solid success far from superficial media fireworks, the original music of Goran Bregovic has gained a real following in our country. For the past four years he has attracted the sensibility of most varied audiences in Europe letting them taste something that started out as original film-track music, and that ends up anchored in our orphic subconscious as the most beautiful, captivating, cross-breed visual symphony that has been woven over this last decade of the XX century. It is a mind-blowing return trip with no destination or port of arrival.

We, the Spanish music-lovers, have joined the pied-piper procession of this Yugoslav (in heart and soul), in July 1998 during the sinuous dance of the "Pyr?n?es Sud" Festival. His unquestionable power of attraction has been proven by this second passage in Barcelona where a crowd followed his stage epiphany in Palau de la Musica, nudged by "Kalasnikov", letting its spirit dance an "Underground Tango" with "Queen Margot" to relieve the "Ausencia" of "Time of the Gypsies" (translator's note: all these are titles of either songs or films for which Bregovic wrote music).

The painstaking travels of this Ulysses of the ear-ocean was generously rewarded. For Goran (according to his own words) the reward was to perform in this most beautiful of concert halls. For those of us who appreciate the hypnotic power of his music, it was to finally hear it under best possible conditions and to be able not only to profit from the contents and the whole, but also from the form in its most minute details, happy to see Bregovic and his inseparable alter-ego, the hyper-filmic Ognjan Radivojevic, faces lit up with joy.

Alongside the author and musical director of this "invention" we find forty musicians of different formations: string orchestra, a male choir, a trio of Bulgarian voices and the ear-blowing brass of the Funeral and Wedding band who, lure us with magnetic force into Bregovic's complex universe. A magnificent concert, one of the greatest marvels to be heard on stage today.

The Balkan Soul offers us not only reasons for fear and weariness as in their latest belligerent exploits. From the mud appear also flowers of incomparable splendour and beauty. Kusturica has made us see them. Bregovic has made us hear them. Together or individually, they bequeath for the artistic archives of the Volcano of Europe the most vivifying lava that one can imagine. May gods and muses of art replace devils of war and disaster. So be it.

Mingus B. FORMENTOR

Bravo!!!!

Posted By: Tombs, Jan 11, 21:07:53